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NYC; Weighing In On the Morals Of Baseball

WHENEVER he speaks out on an issue of international import, his mailbag fills up, John Cardinal O'Connor said. But that is nothing compared with what is happening now. ''When I suggest that perhaps baseball not be played on Good Friday,'' he said in his Sunday homily at St. Patrick's Cathedral, ''the Post Office has to work overtime.''

It seemed more an observation than a lament. The Cardinal is well aware that, justly or not, most people in the New York Archdiocese care more about the box score than a massacre in Rwanda. So it is hard to believe he was terribly surprised to have received a lot of mail after announcing last week that he would boycott Major League Baseball for the rest of this young season. (He did not say which way public opinion was going, pro or con.)

Why skip baseball? Because all teams committed the ''cheapening'' offense of playing on Good Friday, the most somber day on the Christian calendar, commemorating Jesus' crucifixion. Baseball was considered worse than other sports with schedules that day because some teams, like the Yankees, played between noon and 3 P.M., the hours Jesus was on the cross.

''Couldn't miss a single day?'' Cardinal O'Connor wrote in Catholic New York, the Archdiocese's weekly newspaper. ''Even the stock market closes on Good Friday.''

Last month, for example, an arbiter in New York ruled that a professional basketball team had to honor the multimillion-dollar contract of a do-what-you-please player who had punched and choked his coach. What message was being sent to the slam-dunking youth of America?

We are caught up as well in a new installment of the Yankee Stadium soap opera. It may center on hard-eyed economic realities. But it also contains a question of justice for many New Yorkers who, polls show, prefer overwhelmingly that the Yankees stay in the Bronx.

Is it right, they ask, for the Mayor to go to bat as eagerly as he has for a haughty ball club owner who constantly demeans the borough where he makes his money and who does not show New Yorkers enough respect to tell them what it is exactly that he wants?

Now we have Cardinal O'Connor weighing in on the morality of playing baseball anywhere, in or out of the Bronx, on a holy day. The Cardinal did not ask fellow Roman Catholics to join his boycott. But his moral suasion cannot be ignored, even beyond his faith.

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It might be helpful, said Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, for religious leaders to remind sports officials of sensitive dates well in advance. ''I happen to believe that people want to do the right thing,'' he said.

All the same, the Cardinal has sought a special consideration for Christians hardly expected by other religions.

The Board of Rabbis is not asking baseball to show its respect for Jews by delaying the post-season playoffs, scheduled to open the night of Sept. 29. That happens to be the start of Yom Kippur, Judaism's holiest day. Nor has the Islamic Center of New York urged the National Football League to scrap games on Dec. 20, when Islam's holy month of Ramadan is projected to begin.

ACTUALLY, Cardinal O'Connor ''would support the notion of being sensitive to other groups,'' said a spokesman, Joseph Zwilling. But Mr. Zwilling added, ''He'll let other religious leaders speak for their own groups.''

Not fully explained is why the Cardinal zeroed in on baseball. After all, baseball is just a business. Even if Wall Street shut down on Good Friday, commerce elsewhere continued as normal. Baseball is also entertainment. Why not attack all the violent and sexually explicit television programs that were broadcast on Good Friday? All Mr. Zwilling would say is that ''if you want to make an argument that those things should stop, I don't think the Cardinal would disagree.''

Maybe Cardinal O'Connor singled out baseball because he says he loves it. And if you think he is being a bit harsh, it could have been worse. He will rethink his boycott next season, he said.

His father, he wrote, refused to go to a ball game for five years out of disgust over the Yankees' playing on the day Babe Ruth was buried in 1948. There's righteous wrath for you.